I’m a cardiac rehab retread. My doc decided to send me back through rehab in hopes it’ll mend all my torn and worn spots. They tell me that about 10% of the people who go through cardiac rehab need another round. To be honest, I feel blessed that it’s available to me. I’m also hopeful about the good it will do me. When I showed up for my assessment, the staff greeted me like a long lost buddy. Then we... Read more
“I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side.” St Thomas Thomas was one of Jesus’ handpicked Apostles. He reacted to stories of Jesus’ resurrection with sanity. He didn’t believe it. And he told the people he regarded as fantasists that he didn’t believe it as adamantly as he could. Thomas was a first century Jew living in a conquered Roman... Read more
Dorothy Day is a Catholic for our day and all days. Jesus said, “If you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to Me.” From The New Yorker: Day’s Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth... Read more
St Basil the Great, defender of the Church and martyr, From The Divine Liturgy of St Basil: “Free those who are held captive by unclean spirits; sail with those who sail; travel with those who travel; defend the widows; protect the orphans; liberate the captives; heal the sick. “Remember, Lord, those who are in mines, in exile, in harsh labor, and those in every kind of affliction, necessity, or distress; those who entreat your loving kindness; those who love us... Read more
The moral underpinning of the pro life movement has nothing to do with punishing women. It is an affirmation of the simple and obvious fact that the right of human beings to be alive without fear of being murdered is the basic human right. No one has the right to kill another human being for any reason other than self-defense. Self defense is itself limited to situations where the threat is real and imminent, something a reasonable person would see... Read more
When you learn to sit at table with your Judas, you’ll understand the love of Christ. From a meme I saw on Facebook. Forgiveness can be the most difficult demand that Jesus makes of us. Sitting at table with your Judas, with someone close and intimate who has betrayed you, is difficult, I’m sure, although I don’t know much about it. I haven’t been through the betrayals that happen during a divorce, haven’t experienced the back-stabbing that some relatives... Read more
Holy Week opened today as it is does each year, with palms. Churches distribute palms, and worshippers process into the church. Mothers everywhere whisper “Stop that!” to the horseplay that results. We were Episcopalians back in the early 1990s, but the mass was the same. My little boys had to be reminded that the palms were not swords. It was always a challenge to keep them walking in line into the church and then to deal with the squirming, poking,... Read more
A normal Lent for American Catholics is drenched in petty personal piety and nonsensical “sacrifice” like giving up chewing gum and going to confession to seek forgiveness for getting wasted at last summer’s Fourth of July party. Lent, American style, has very little to do with the blood-drenched Passion of Our Lord, and even less to do with the reality that the world around us is a butcher shop. We Americans are, on the surface at least, a privileged people.... Read more
Ave Maria. Enjoy. Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In